UC Berkeley ML pioneer wins top computing gong

This year's ACM Prize in Computing is going toward a machine learning specialist whose work, even if you haven't heard of him, is likely to be familiar. Pieter Abbeel, UC Berkeley professor and co-founder of AI robotics company Covariant, was awarded the prize and its $250,000 bounty, which is given to those in the machine learning field "whose research contributions have fundamental impact and broad implications." Abbeel is a professor of computer science and electrical engineering whose work has already received some recognition. Along with this new award, he was named a top young innovator under 25 by the MIT Technology Review and won a prize given out to the best US PhD thesis in robotics and automation. ACM said Abbeel was a trailblazer in apprenticeship and reinforcement learning, and highlighted a clothes-folding robot he designed that was better able to manipulate deformable objects.